Nonviolence Read Online Free

Jewish law, there was no room for violence of any kind, even emotional violence, and weapons, military, and war were clearly illegal. The righteous person who walked in God's path loved everyone, even his enemies.
    Jesus was seen as dangerous because he rejected not only warfare and killing but any kind of force. Those in authority saw this as a challenge. How could there be authority without force? This was trouble for the rabbinate, and was even more trouble for the military occupiers, the Romans. Jesus built a following that was attracted to his uncompromising point of view—the kind of people who are called troublemakers. He was tortured to death by the Romans in a manner so grisly and violent, it was surely designed to repel his followers. But they insisted that Jesus had died forgiving his torturers.
    Death by crucifixion is believed to be a Phoenician invention. Unarguably a horrifying death, it was thought by the Romans to be a humiliating and degrading one as well, and they did not use it on Roman citizens. Those first Christians would not have used the symbol of a cross, a weapon of violence, much less a crucifix, which was a depiction of violent death. They were led by a fisherman, and their symbol was a fish.
    The early Christians persisted in an uncompromising and narrow interpretation of Jewish law. In the book of Matthew is written, “You have heard it said: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, resist not him that is evil.” The rejected eye-foran-eye formula is not a peripheral piece of Jewish commentary, it is from the book of Exodus. Major Old Testament figures, including not only David but Samson, Joshua, and Gideon, were military men. But slowly the idea emerged among the followers of Jesus that they should hold Jewish law to a higher standard and that though warfare had been tolerated, it would be no longer.
    A split, the first and probably the most important of many schisms in Christianity, occurred between Jesus' disciples Peter and Paul. Paul, whose original name was Saul, and Peter, who was originally named Simon, were both Jewish. But Paul, unlike Peter, was not one of Jesus' entourage and never knew him. While Peter was afisherman in Galilee, Paul was a religious scholar from Asia Minor. And yet it was Peter, the fisherman, who wanted the followers of Jesus to remain Jewish and apply Jesus' teachings to the perfection of Judaism. Paul, the Hebraic scholar, wanted to open up Christianity to the world, pursuing converts wherever they were found, a most un-Jewish approach.
    Under Paul's influence the Christians moved further away from the body of Judaism, further away from everyone. They became an odd and distinct cult on the outer margins of society, uncompromisingly dedicated to pacifism. Theirs was a unique antiwar posture. Even the pious and spartan Jewish sect known as the Essenes did not entirely denounce weapons.
    The early Christians are the earliest known group that renounced warfare in all its forms and rejected all its institutions. This small and original group was devoted to antimilitarism, another concept, like nonviolence, that has no positive word. This anti-militarism was never expressed by Jesus, who, in fact, did not much address the issue of warfare, though he did denounce the violent overthrow of the Romans. Warmongering Christian fundamentalists have always clung to the absence of a specific stand on warfare, ignoring the obvious, which is that the wholesale institutionalized slaughter of fellow human beings is clearly a violation of the precise and literal teachings of Jesus. In the days of the great Western debate on slavery, slave owners used a similar argument—that Jesus had not said anything about slavery. But obviously the buying and selling of human beings would not constitute treating others as you would have them treat you.
    For 284 years, roughly the same span of time as from the end of Louis XIV's reign in France to the beginning of the